November 2006

- Back in the computer room again. I looked at the printer, it was fairly new: in fact I had installed it not very long ago. It certainly didn't have a worn out feed mechanism and obviously it had just printed several pages. As I thought about that, I became aware that the room seemed humid - much more so than it should have been given the temperature. I then noticed the elephant: a freshly plastered wall. I put my hand on it, it wasn't damp, but it was still fairly cold. The manager had followed me. I turned and asked the obvious: "Was this done recently?". She responded affirmatively.

- I think Novell is standing at this altar after having had a long talk with someone holding a shotgun. The language in the agreement about not suing Novell is what makes me think that: I think Microsoft is doing a "divide and conquer" plan and using patents as its tool.

- Microsoft offers several virtual appliances: The problem, of course, is the underlying OS: even if the appliance app was something they'd happily give away, they can't give you the underlying OS that services that app. That's going to continue to hamper any wide spread use of Microsoft virtual appliances. I don't see that there's much they can do about it: I suppose they could try to put out something crippled that they could use as a base, but any attempt like that would seem to let the horses out of the barn and invite abuse by those who would want to piggy-back their own apps on such a platform. The problem seems intractable.

- Of course I'd like to think that my anti-Republican vote gets recorded properly. Apparently at a few places around the country that wasn't always the case. Now we all understand that there will always be some level of fraud or attempts in that direction: aside from the normal greed and corruption we always have, many people have extremely strong feelings on certain issues and feel that electing the "wrong" candidate is so dangerous that they are willing to cast aside honesty to prevent such a "mistake".

- So, I went to Task Manager, and found msie701.exe sitting there. Funny, I thought, I am a Firefox only kind of guy, so what the $%^& was an msie task doing there. Needless to say, I could not 'End Process" as Access was Denied (Windoze machines are SO secure...), so i went for regedit. I found only one reference to the rogue exe, under a label REG_EXTEND_SZ. I bravely deleted it, and lo and behold, my machine was fast again.

- I've booted a few live CD's, but I can't say I've ever really done much with them. I know that there are some specialized recovery and debugging cd's that I probably should take the time to get familiar with, but like so many other things, I just haven't gotten around to it.

- Review of 'What the Bleep do we Know?': In essence, this film wants to reconcile science and spirituality. Aside from the utter nonsense you can read about at the Wikipedia article (link above), what always annoys me about the attempts to do this is that in actuality, science is tossed out the window and ignored the moment some supposed link is observed.

- How to post to newsgroups: It seems that Google Groups has introduced a large number of new Usenet News users. To us old timers, "news" was the only way to have public discussions: early web pages seldom allowed for comments, and the old dial-up bulletin boards hadn't yet transitioned to the web.